thin client or stand alone - which is better?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Fri, 25 Jan 2008, David Trask wrote:

> I'm not 100% positive, and Oli or Scott can answer this much better than
> I, but I know that the ability to have both "thick and thin" clients from
> an Edubuntu server has been discussed at UDS's in the past.  I'm not sure
> where the spec is at the moment, but I believe and hope that what you are
> talking about MAY be addressed in an upcoming release....perhaps even as
> soon as Hardy.

The primary thing that needs to be done here, I suspect, is LDAP
integration (there has been a central authentication server spec for
several releases now).  Until the accounts are stored in something like
LDAP rather than the traditional files in /etc, thick clients will involve
a fair amount of legwork by the person doing the setup and the user-admin
tools in ubuntu by default won't work properly, eg what happens if a user
logs in and tries to change their password if LDAP is in use?

Last I heard, the lack of a users-admin tool which worked with ldap was the
big problem.  debian-edu have been using LDAP by default for years, but
they use webmin for administering it.

Once centralised authentication works, a thick client can probably be done
with a few nfs mounts.

Gavin